Sullivan: Is there any more fascinating character on television right now than Cersei Lannister? She’s awful and ruthless—in calling for the head of Tyrion, she’s essentially declared open season on dwarves, as every fool with a sword tries to collect the reward. She can be spiteful and short-sighted—I love the befuddled “are you freakin’ kidding me?” look Jaime gives Cersei when she complains that he’s “never been a father to [Myrcella.]”

And yet, just as you start cheering on Uncle Kevan for calling her out, the sound dies in your throat as you realize that once again, a man is cutting Cersei down to size simply because she's a woman. It doesn’t matter how powerful or cunning or ambitious she is. In her world, Cersei will always be less-than.

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“I do not recognize your authority to dictate what is and is not my concern,” Kevan tells Cersei as she tries to assert her role as temporary Hand of the King. “You are the queen mother. Nothing more.” Well.

Cersei is indeed a mother, and in her first scene this episode she actually looks scared for her daughter, Myrcella, who was shipped off to Dorne several seasons ago to forge a political alliance with the Martells through marriage, but who may be more of a prisoner now. The queen has never been happy about the arrangement—she originally protested that she didn’t want her daughter married off for political benefit as she was. But last year, she began expressing concern for Myrcella’s safety after Oberyn hinted that the line between ward and hostage can shift.

If you’ll remember, Oberyn tried to reassure Cersei while also claiming moral high ground for the Martells: “We don’t hurt little girls in Dorne.” To which Cersei had the heartbreaking reply, “Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.”

With Oberyn now dead, the arrival of a snakegram would cause any mother to panic. (As well she should, given that the snake was probably sent by Oberyn’s paramour, Ellaria Sand, who has suddenly become a cartoonish villain and begs Prince Doran to “let me send [Myrcella] to Cersei one finger at a time.”) It’s the sight of Cersei in such a terrified state, and not a little guilt about setting Tyrion free, that leads Jaime to embark on a two-man rescue expedition to Dorne. That, in turn, leads the rest of us to squee about the comic banter surely to accompany a Bronn-and-Jaime road trip. It has to be better than discussing wedding menus. Pigeon pie, anyone?

In the meantime, our other favorite road-tripping duo has hit a bit of a setback. Eagle-eyed Podrick spots Sansa and Baelish dining at their pub—“Ready the horses,” orders Brienne. “My lady, we only have one horse.” But Brienne is now 0-for-2 with Stark girls, as Sansa joins Arya in rejecting her offer of protection. “You should leave,” she tells Brienne, sounding like an embarrassed princess dismissing an unwanted suitor.

Pod delicately tries to get Brienne to face facts—“My lady, both Stark girls refused your service. Maybe you’re released from your vow…” But being our bullheaded Brienne, she brushes him off. Their new mission: track Sansa and watch over her from a distance. At this point in Game of Thrones-world, we should know that means Brienne will likely rescue Sansa down the road. Hopefully she’ll have time to give Pod some riding lessons while they wait.

I want to return to the Wall before I hand this off to one of you. And let’s get this out of the way: I know there are a lot of Kit Harrington haters out there. I am not one of them. His Jon Snow—taciturn, poker-faced—seems to me perfectly fitting with a young man who grew up a bastard in the Stark household, knowing his presence was resented by Catelyn Stark. He learned to watch carefully and stay out of the way, while also embracing Ned Stark’s compassion and strict moral code.

Or it could be that I’m just swayed by that glorious head of hair.

It doesn’t matter how powerful or cunning or ambitious she is. In her world, Cersei will always be less-than.

Either way, it’s a happy day for Westeros when Jon Snow is elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. It’s the least he deserves after turning down the chance to become Jon Stark, lord of Winterfell. If you don’t daydream about the remaining Stark kids reuniting at Winterfell and being greeted with bear hugs by their big brother Jon, well then, you don’t have a heart.

After a slower opening episode, there was so much packed into this hour that it sent my head spinning around the Seven Kingdoms. I haven’t even touched on the Water Gardens of Dorne, the most promising new setting we’ve seen in at least a season. Or the total catastrophe that Dany’s rule in Meereen is becoming. Or the return of Arya and her mantra of doom.

Are you excited about Arya’s arrival at the House of Black and White, Chris? Or are you as worried as I am about this plotline, one of my least favorite from the books? You can disagree—just please don’t send me a snakegram.

Orr: I’m probably somewhere in the middle when it comes to Arya’s storyline at the House of Black and White: I don’t love it, but I don’t mind it. My hope is that with a little acceleration—and showrunners Benioff and Weiss seem to be providing that to pretty much all of George R. R. Martin’s plotlines this season—it will be fine. I do like the portrayal of Braavos as essentially a more foreboding version of Venice. And did you notice how short Arya’s enemy-list mantra has become? “Cersei, Walder Frey, the Mountain, Meryn Trant.” That’s it! Westeros: where if you’re not quick, someone else will fulfill your vendettas before you.

I’m with you—or at least approaching you—on Jon Snow. I’m no Harrington-hater, but I found Jon among the least interesting characters of the first few seasons, largely for reasons outside his control. He was supposed to be a bit diffident and indecisive, and while Harrington nailed those traits, they’re not terribly cinematic. Plus, until recently Jon suffered from the same geographic disadvantage that has always plagued Daenerys. Like the cities of Slaver’s Bay, the Wall is so remote from the goings-on elsewhere in Westeros (and in King’s Landing in particular) that its subplots have always seemed a bit disconnected. In any case, both of these problems are gradually being solved. First, Ygritte kissed a bit of fire into Jon—embers that have since been stoked by his rise into leadership—and second, Stannis arrived at the Wall, making it very much a part of the geopolitical map. Jon (and Stannis, too, as I’ve mentioned before) have both become all the more interesting for it. Also, regarding the hair, Harrington is contractually obligated not to cut it.

Happy as I’ve been about some of the compressions and omissions we’ve already seen from the sprawl of GRRM’s later novels, I did miss one bit that didn’t make it into this episode. In the books, Jon gets elected 998th commander of the Night’s Watch as the result of some delightful subterfuge conducted by Samwell Tarly, who plays the other candidates off one another with Varys-like cunning. I was sorry this was cut: Sam’s not afforded very many opportunities to be a hero, and this was among his best.

While we’re still at the Wall, I was interested in the scene in which Shireen, Stannis’s daughter, continued her “Reading is Fundamental” campaign with Gilly. Apart from offering yet another example of what a crummy parent Queen Selyse is, the scene served mostly to give us the longest explanation to date of the disfiguring (and typically lethal) disease greyscale. Do I detect foreshadowing?

The new storyline involving Jaime and Bronn seems more than a tad silly: Two men (one of whom is one-handed and has never before set foot in Dorne) are going to trek halfway across the continent to infiltrate the Water Gardens and rescue Myrcella from her royal custody? They may as well cue up Lalo Schifrin’s theme from Mission: Impossible. But at least this gives us more screen time with Bronn, who was largely absent from the books by this point. Even a line as simple as “Jaime fucking Lannister” is given a lift by Jerome Flynn’s delivery.

The new storyline involving Jaime and Bronn seems more than a tad silly.

Speaking of Dorne, it is lovely. (The Water Gardens scenes are shot on the grounds of the Alcazar palace in Seville, Spain.) But what gives with Ellaria Sand? Last season, she was all languid curves and polymorphous perversity. Now that her paramour Oberyn is dead—a fact concerning which no one is more unhappy than I—she seems like a different character altogether. With her short hair, combat-ready attire, and proto-Ramsay torture-lust, I scarcely recognized her.

I don’t have much to add to your take on Brienne, Amy. Perhaps the only thing worse than running around Westeros never finding any Stark girls (which is what happens in the books) is finding both and having them turn down your sword one after the other. Here’s hoping Brienne’s luck changes.

At least Tyrion and Varys are chugging amiably along the road to Volantis (which leads to the road to Meereen). As Amy and I mentioned last week, Spencer, this trip—involving a half-dozen additional characters whom Benioff and Weiss seem to have wisely jettisoned—was interminable in the books, and Tyrion himself a self-pitying boor. At least here he’s still cracking wise, however drunk he may be. (Varys: “Are we really going to spend the entire road to Volantis talking about the futility of everything?” Tyrion: “You’re right. No point.”) Also nice was the visual joke when we cut from Tyrion’s “How many dwarves are there in the world? Is Cersei going to kill them all?” to the severed dwarf-head being rolled out for said sister.

As for the Queen Mother, she’s going to get less sympathy from me than she does from you, Amy. Was Uncle Kevan’s rebuke at the Small Council implicitly sexist? I suppose so. But it was also the most intelligent thing anyone has said to Cersei since Tywin’s death. (You may recall that it was the latter, back in season three, who told his daughter, “I don’t distrust you because you’re a woman. I distrust you because you’re not as smart as you think you are.”) A Cersei unchecked by Tywin or Tyrion is one who will quickly discover she’s not half the plotter she imagines herself to be.

Although speaking of misrule, you’d be hard pressed to do worse than Daenerys this episode. At the very least she could have taken Hizdahr zo Loraq’s advice and just killed the former slave and over-exuberant vigilante in private. Instead, she gathers all of Meereen for his public beheading, and then is surprised when it doesn’t go well? Let me break this down for you, Dany: The ex-masters already hate you; when you get on the wrong side of the ex-slaves, too, that leaves you with no constituency at all. Somebody get that queen a pollster.

How about you, Spencer? What do your polls say? Who’s up, who’s down, and who’s just treading water?

Kornhaber: Cersei leads in my approval polls, though the story would be different if Gallup were to survey King's Landing. Amy, you asked whether there's a more fascinating character on TV than her. I haven't seen every TV show, so I'll just say: Lena Heady is the most compelling actor on the Thrones cast at this point, which is a big compliment. Favorite line reading this week: “It’s a threat,” Jaime blurts upon opening the snake-in-a-box, to which Headey-as-Cersei heaves, “Of course it’s a threat,” looking and sounding like someone impatient at their own nausea.

I'm as scared as Cersei, but it's on her own behalf and not Myrcella's. With last episode’s depiction of the witch's prophecy and the machinations of Margaery (or, as Cersei puts it, “that smirking WHORE from Highgarden”), and this episode’s hostility from Ellaria and Uncle Kevan, the show seems to be setting up some awful calamity for the Queen Mother. If she’s the next character to lay stone-eyed in the Sept—book readers, please don’t tell me whether she is—Thrones will have a massive entertainment void to fill.

It could fill that void, perhaps, with more scenes of Tyrion and Varys bickering like two RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants. Conleth Hill doesn’t get enough acclaim for vesting the Spider with a distinctive blend of flamboyance and nonchalance, but he should after this episode’s caravan conversation, which was possibly the sassiest Thrones scene ever (“Best be careful, you might accidentally consume some solid food” is a Lucille Bluth-level reading). The banter also came with some profundity, like this explanation of what motivates Thrones’s many cripples, bastards, and broken things:

Varys: People follow leaders. They never follow us. They find us repulsive.

Tyrion: I find us repulsive.

Varys: And we find them repulsive, which is why we surround ourselves with large, comfortable boxes to keep them away. And yet, no matter what we do, people like you and me are never really satisfied inside the box. Not for long.

While inside the box, Tyrion appears to be keeping the Brooklyn-y scruff he acquired in steerage, which is fine by me—Dinklage looks good! It’s just one of physical makeovers we’ve seen recently: Ellaria Sand as Cruella de Vil, Sansa Stark as Corpse Bride, and Bronn as nouveau riche. The costume changes epitomize the way that, five seasons into its run, Game of Thrones can now reap the rewards of careful, long-term character development. Even the folks who aren’t sporting new ‘dos and threads have evolved in recognizable ways—Jon into a world-weary leader, as you two mentioned; Arya into a pigeon-decapitating ronin; Jaime into a brokenhearted do-gooder. Regardless of whether the plot delivers as many twists as previous seasons have, the episodes to come should thrill merely because we get to see these familiar faces interact with the world in from slightly new perspectives.

Meereen's divided populace have drawn comparisons to Iraqis under American occupation.

Danaerys too has transformed recently, but into a less confident, more anxious Khaleesi. You can understand: Her trusted adviser just compared her to her mass-murderer father, the ex-slave who she elevated to her council just disobeyed orders, and she sparked a sectarian brawl by executing said ex-slave in public. The return of the prodigal Drogon came as emotional relief—not only is her dragon back in a time of need, but her psychic link with her reptile kids has been reaffirmed—though it’s not clear how he’ll help quash the unrest in Meereen. Rioting subjects are bad, but charred ones are worse.

All the debate in Dany's council over fair trials for a terrorist is an example of how the Dany plotline so often recalls real-world happenings. Meereen's divided populace and insurgents, in fact, have drawn comparisons to Iraqis under American occupation. So it makes sense that the show's political point of view once again is coming into focus. “You are the law,” Mossador tells his liberator, to which Danaerys replies that “the law is the law.” The thing is, in Game of Thrones, the law often is the same as the ruler: Stannis vests himself with the power to make Jon Snow a Stark; the small council bickers in the absence of a suitable king. Dany may have to learn the lesson that Ned and Robb never got the chance to learn, which is that breaking rules in defense of virtue can be a virtue in itself, and that doing the right thing for principle's sake often turns out to be the dead-wrong choice.

About the Authors

Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the principal film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for the New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.